Perfect binding can be an ideal solution for books, manuals, magazines and a host of other rendered products due to its attractive combination of versatility and cost-effectiveness. In general, a bookbinding system collects a number of sheets (or pages) into a text body (or book block) that includes a spine and two side hinge areas. The bookbinding system applies an adhesive to the text body spine to bind the sheets together. A cover may be attached to the bound text body by applying an adhesive to the side hinge areas or the spine of the text body or both. As the number of sheets forming a booklet increases, the fold line of the bounded booklet is rounded and bulged, which causes a problem of degradation in appearance and feature of the booklet. A major disadvantage of such typical high volume bindings is that the bound books cannot be opened to lay flat.
Hinged media such as, for example, EverFlat™ media, can be configured as a multi-substrate specialty media that contains a polyester hinge between the binding spine and the remainder of the page. Such media facilitates the production of books that lay much flatter when opened than conventional books. Note that EverFlat™ is a trademark of the Xerox Corporation. EverFlat™ media, for example, with a polyester hinge, can be designed to enable spreads on perfect bound books (whether soft or hard cover) to lie completely flat when opened. This can be achieved because the hinged portion of the media is much more flexible than the paper portion of the media. When the book pages fold, the first and last pages in a book can fold in the outermost portions of the hinge, where the paper portion of the media is under, for example, the polyester. The next set of pages can fold at a place in the hinge closer to the spine since this set of pages has to clear the outermost set of pages.
Each subsequent set of pages can fold closer and closer to the spine until the fold happens on the inner side of the hinge. Additional pages after this will not lie flat since the height from the spine to the top of the already folded pages increases past the height of the hinge when the pages are vertical. Such an approach limits the thickness of books that can be made utilizing hinged media. Hence, the hinge can be made really wide to alleviate this problem, but content imaged on the hinge can show substantial color shifts, so this is not desirable or even acceptable in some cases.
Based on the foregoing, it is believed that a need exists for an improved method and system for enhancing the production of larger books that lay much flatter utilizing the multi-substrate hinged media without manual evaluation and exception programming.